conda looking for library outside activate environment

Question

I am working on Windows, I find a difference in import behavior about conda created environment which I cannot understand, here the details

Case 1 (Success)

Answer 1

You need to activate your environment. See that:

(base) C:\> conda activate 
(env-name) C:\> python
>>> import numpy
(Success)

There is a (base)which means that the active environment name is based. Try doing conda info --envs

to se a list of environments.

When you do:

C:\> cd 
C:\path-to-conda-env> python
>>> import numpy
(Fail)

You are navigating to the folder of the environment but you are not using the python environment that it holds.

Try using:

which python

to see which python version you are using.